IN THE DETAILS

Jason Segel Tells Us About His Recurring Childhood Nightmares

Since his early days as a supporting player on Freaks and Geeks, Jason Segel has graduated to writing, producing, and starring in many a Hollywood hit, rebooting Jim Henson’s fuzzy franchise with 2011’s The Muppets, and headlining nine seasons of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother. All that, and he made a Sex Tape comedy with Cameron Diaz, out in July, and co-authored a young-adult novel, Nightmares!, with Kirsten Miller, that arrives in book stores this September. We spoke to Segel for July’s issue of Vanity Fair, but there were so many fascinating details about the 34-year-old that we wanted to share them with you on the Web. Herewith, interview outtakes about Hollywood’s most affable funny man.

He had recurring nightmares about being trapped inside Dracula’s home from the age of eight to 13. “As the years progressed—and this [is an example of] the mind at work—I became more and more familiar with Dracula’s floor plan. I eventually found a secret room in Dracula’s house that even Dracula didn’t know about. By the end of this run of nightmares, I had created this very cushy living-room environment where I could hide from Dracula and play video games.”

Walter, the new Muppet invented for The Muppets, was named after the very first puppet Segel ever owned—an old man purchased at Faneuil Hall in Boston.

A comedy experiment done while performing live onstage twice— once with the Swell Season and once with Maroon 5—didn’t go so well. Segel gave out a phone number he had set up expressly for this purpose to the entire audience. Afterward, he listened to the messages: “They were all almost exclusively people asking if I could get a script to Judd Apatow. It was really disappointing.”

He sold his first-ever screenplay, but it was never made into a movie. When Segel had the chance to buy it back, he did, and used it as the basis for the aforementioned young-adult novel, out in stores this fall.

What bothers him most is when someone “is rude to people in a service position. That is a total deal breaker for me.” Although he’s never had a service position per se, he tries “to view life as a service position.”

That rumor you heard about him living in Charlie Chaplin’s house? Total bunk. “O.K., let me tell you something,” he says, when I ask. “This is the rumor about every house in Los Angeles. Every house in Los Angeles was allegedly, at some point, Charlie Chaplin’s house.”